The value of an organization’s data may be difficult to quantify, but any company that suffers loss of mission-critical information can attest to its worth. Unfortunately, traditional storage technologies no longer offer sufficient protection against malicious actions or mistakes. Organizations need to implement a viable backup and recovery solution backed by unlimited, efficient, and incremental snapshots, say experts at ioFABRIC Inc.

The FBI estimates that the total amount of ransom payments approaches $1 billion annually, while Juniper Research states cyber crimes will cost businesses over $2 trillion by 2019. The need for a data management solution, incorporating snapshot technology to guarantee business continuity, is at an all-time high. During a ransomware attack, organizations will find their entire network encrypted and inaccessible without paying a ransom in the tens of thousands of dollars. The subsequent loss of productivity and IT focus while dealing with such an attack will be significantly more than the cost of paying the ransom itself. With immutable snapshots, that cannot be altered or deleted, organizations will be able to access or recover all their data without paying a ransom. Snapshots allow an administrator to quickly restore a volume to its previous state, or restore specific files from any time in the past.

“It’s unfortunate that we have the situation where someone can hack into your organization and hold your data hostage,” said ioFABRIC CEO and co-founder Steven Lamb. “Rather than living in fear of a ransomware attack or a catastrophic error, organizations need to adopt a data protection solution backed by immutable snapshots so they can resume operations in minutes — without potentially having to pay a ransom.”

ioFABRIC Vicinity delivers a multi-site, multi-cloud data fabric that ensures complete data protection and availability. Vicinity keeps snapshots so organizations can quickly restore to a previous state by simply promoting one to be the current instance of a volume. For additional protection against site disasters, Vicinity offers SnapCopy functionality that sends a complete copy of all data to a remote location. Using the absorb feature, geographically remote SnapCopys can be used to restore local operations in seconds. Additional security features built into Vicinity ensure that all actions are taken from an authorized account with validation required to ensure protection against deletion or other destructive operations. All operations take place within Vicinity, simplifying the IT environment, reducing OPEX and improving agility.

For additional information about how ioFABRIC approaches ransomware through immutable snapshots and SnapCopy technologies, interested parties can visit http://www.ioFABRIC.com/.